Guyton / Walker at Kunsthaus Bregenz

On my way back from Art Basel, I decided to stop in Bregenz to see the show at the small Kunsthaus there and I was overwhelmed!

Kunsthaus Bregenz devoted each of its three floors to another artist: Wade Guyton, Kelley Walker and their collaborative work by Guyton/Walker. 'This is an entirely separate artist' says Wade Guyton about Guyton/Walker.

All three share the use of a digital Epson printer as means to produce 'drawings', 'paintings' and sculptures.

I don't have the impression either one of them is really into painting - all three are concept artists who chose to print their vocabulary of form on paper, wallpaper, canvas or laminate. The result is surprisingly beautiful and convincing.

The artist Carol Bove once said to the critic Scott Rothkopf about Wade Guyton's canvases, 'They seem to scream: Look how almost not a painting I am!'

Guyton started with his printer works by randomly printing Xs, Us, black squares or red stripes on pages torn from (mostly art) magazines piled up in his studio. Just like an action painting using a printer. From the beginning on he started to call these paperworks 'drawings'.

Detail of work by Wade Guyton at Wade Guyton, Guyton/Walker, Kelley Walker at Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2013 (c) the artist

He then wondered, 'Well, if there are drawings, how would I make a painting?' The solution was to run unprimed and folded canvases a number of times through a large Epson 9600 printer, he bought together with Kelley Walker. Printing errors are welcome marks of coincidence and they totally lack artistic composition. Just like Gerhard Richter's random color sample works, the results are surprisingly beautiful.

Guyton's form vocabulary of Xs, Us and stripes facilitates the comparison of two previously folded canvas halfs.

In 2007, Wade Guyton started to simply print 'black' at the folded canvas by the full width of his printer. However, because of the printing errors, all canvases are highly individualized prints of art-historically super-charged black squares.

Wade Guyton is not only interested in process, but also in architecture and situation. For a number of shows with these monochrome prints, Guyton painted the floor fresh with black color. So, after you entered the gallery, you smelled the fresh paint, but on the works there was absolutely none of it.

On the second floor there were the well-known brick wall printings by Kelley Walker. He printed a brick wall like pattern on images of found images on the canvas.

The most interesting and stringent body of work is their collaborative work by the artist persona Guyton/Walker. They go even as far to choose Guyton/Walker to be represented by another gallery as the two individual artists are.

Guyton/Walker is even more radical in the process of printing of found images on 'found objects' like tables or mattresses.

Work by Guyton/Walker at 'Wade Guyton, Guyton/Walker, Kelley Walker' at Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2013 (c) the artists

In a time, when objects, like intelligent garments or refrigerators communicate about us automatically in the internet, it is great to create art that screams at us 'digital is already all over'! Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker really hit the Zeitgeist.